THE CEREBELLAR CONTRIBUTION TO LANGUAGE AND SEQUENTIAL FUNCTIONS - EVIDENCE FROM A CHILD WITH CEREBELLITIS

We report the case of a 4 years and 2 months old girl, whose developme nt was normal before she suffered from severe viral cerebellitis. When she recovered from the acute phase, a complete loss of speech was evi dent, although language comprehension was not impaired. Mutism disappe ared after about two weeks, giving way to the aphonic utterance of a f ew words. After three months, her speech was slow and monotonous, with out phonetic disturbances. She could only produce very simple and inco mplete sentences in both spontaneous and constrained situations and sh e was able to mantain discourse sequentiality only under continuous gu idance. No deficit in single-word recognition or naming was detected. Her sentence reproduction was good, while verbal fluency was very poor when no cue was given, but was normal with category cues. Her intelli gence was within the normal range, but activities requiring programmin g, particularly those involving sequencing, were very defective. The p atient's impairment is attributed to the failure of the cerebellar-fro ntal loops to activate strategies involved in processing and programmi ng verbal and sequential functions.